Siobhan McKenna is Lachlan Murdoch’s right-hand person, and she obviously knows sharemarket value when she sees it. And she can also recognise a financial black hole when she sees it, such as Ten. She quit the Ten board on Wednesday to go to News Corp Australia as director of broadcast, whatever that means. And she is so indispensable to Lachlan that he doesn’t want to or can’t find a replacement for the board seat she had at Ten. Or perhaps he won’t replace her until Ten sorts out its finances, reveals a whacking great write-down and fesses up to a nasty loss for the six months to February 28.

She had been Murdoch’s eyes and ears on the Ten board since mid-2012, and together they have watched his 8.9% or thereabouts stake in the broadcaster shrink by the day. And though he is a billionaire because of his share of the family fortune (based on minority but controlling 39% stakes in News Corp and 21st Century Fox), a loss is a loss, and painfully public.

McKenna is obvious numerate and understood the real situation at Ten — that it was not worth wasting her hard-earned in buying shares in the TV broadcaster. How do we know that? Well, when directors leave listed company boards the company is required to file a notice with the ASX detailing how many shares that director held at the time of departure. In McKenna’s case it was zero, nil, nothing. From the time she joined the Ten board until she quit this week she didn’t think it worth her money buying shares in the company so that she could understand some of the pain shareholders were going through as they watched their investments sink under the weight of dud decisions. 

In November, 2010, James Packer’s private company Consolidated Press Holdings Ltd reported the sale of 93.42 million of his Ten shares worth $128.17 million to Murdoch’s private company, Illyria. The stake was half Packer’s 17.8% interest acquired a month earlier in late October at a cost of $280 million. The Illyria purchase was at $1.37 a share, which was the price paid by Packer (net of any dividends received) when he bought into Ten.

At yesterday’s closing price of 66 cents, the loss doesn’t look to bad (around 51% or 71 cents a share), except Ten shares though were consolidated 10 for one last year so that 66 cents is really 6.6 cents, but the $1.37 a share is really $13.70 after the consolidation. The actual loss is just over $13 a share, or 94% (or before the consolidation, around $1.30 a share on the original cost of $1.37). That is a big ouch. James Packer is also facing a similar-sized loss. No wonder he tried to sell the Ten stake a few weeks ago through UBS. No wonder there were no takers. — Glenn Dyer